Here, every child in school learns about the Electoral College. Its true alot of Americans even make the mistake of thinking the President is elected by the people. But they are either ignorant, or didn't pay attention that day in class.

Today, in this country, it seems absurd that elections could be rigged by 'political bosses' and organized crime. But that was the reality of elections in the US thru out the 19th and early 20th century. I don't remember who said it but "with universal suffrage, a vote is only worth as much as your next meal".

It looks like a win for MS... :-|Also it's a signal that McNealy's good line to opposite MS unfortunately didn't work commercially speaking.McNealy, who nicknamed himself Luke Skywalker a few times, how will he continue to battle the Death Star?

Yes, but what happens to other institutes licencing Java for their own VM'sMy *guess* is that this technology swap only applies to Sun and Microsoft.

How could IBM, HP or BEA for example make use of this technology?

Okay I Am Not A Lawyer And This Is Not Leagal Advice.

Clear on that? 'cause you are starting to get into questions which I would only trust a lawyers answer on if I was going to base a business decision on it.

Now, for their own VMs? It depends. I know IBM is licensee of Hotspot. Thus stuff that made it into the Hotspot source base I would assume they would have rights to use as a licensee. But if they want access to the MSFT patent library for their own independant development then they'll have to make their own deals.

Now IBM has a huge patent library, I think even MSFT would be foolish to get into that fight with them.

BEA, if they want to develop their own VM, are gonna have to swollow the costs of development like everyone else, which might mean negotiating patent righst with MSFt or IBM or even Sun depending on what it is they want to do.

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Here, every child in school learns about the Electoral College. Its true alot of Americans even make the mistake of thinking the President is elected by the people. But they are either ignorant, or didn't pay attention that day in class.

Well thats not quite true. In many (but not all) states the electoral college representatives are legally required to vote in proportions directly based on the popular vote.

But if you want to talk numerbs its not really fair to say Gore won either (much as I'd like to.) The fact of the matter is that it was a statistical tie. The number of votes being argued at the end was WELL under the statistical margin of error.

But our system is not prepared for a tie. IMO Gore did the right thing by bowing out rather then put the country through whatw as shaping up to be a very very nasty fight. Unfortunately, since the right thing to do was bow out, we got the man who didn't do the right thing Given that the rest of Bush's tenure one might argue was highly predictable.

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Another angle: The EU *punished* MS for $600m for being naughty in the EU. Microsoft *settled* for $700m for anti-trust crimes against Sun globally. Suck on that Eurocrats!

btw, the recent EU stuff didn't actually do anything much to help Sun. Obviously there'll be an appeals process anyway. For the stuff that relates to Sun it was more like "let other companies license the protocols" which is pretty much what the US guys said. It also seems Sun will have to pay little money in return. If you look at what Sun sued MS over in the first place, they got nearly everything they asked for - there was never much scope for Sun to be able to do serious "damage" to Microsoft, and anything serious would have taken 5-10 years.

And Scott very much clearly stated his intension to compete against Microsoft. With the license agreement, now makes it easier to replace Microsoft software with Sun software, and you bet he intends to do that (and ditto for Jonathan Schwartz). Sun and MS are certainly not teaming up in any way shape or form - this is more a result of that the current situation was overly negative for both companies. For example, Scott said he decided to initiate discussions about a year ago after customers *asked* him to.

Can't help but I don't trust this "deal". I really hope it won't have negative effects on Java.

{Edit} PS: There are some highly interesting articles from Java developers on the Javalobby forum about Rick's article (agreeing and disagreeing ones). Of course, most of them don't know what the bosses of SUN and others know. However in my experience the people tend to have a good "sense" for what is going on. Sixth sense maybe. ;-)

Why a guy with a almost a decade investment in advocating Java AND offered a higest software possition is leaving a company for a startup, the very same day MS deal was announced?

Why a guy that announced "weeks ago" he is leaving company is left to finish a 2B$ deal?

Why after all the damage that news has made, a guy still hasn't said a word about his departure?

And why the that same guy, so much involved in talks, and so determined to leave, 2 days before a deal, uses "we" all over the place when talking about Sun left "door still open to opensource Java", citing compatibility-brand-license problems, while a new software chief John Loiacono, sitting next to him, oposes with less-optimistic viewpoint, noting previous Sun pronouncements that Sun would make Java open-source as soon as IBM opens up its products such as WebSphere.

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Sun and MS are certainly not teaming up in any way shape or form - this is more a result of that the current situation was overly negative for both companies.

It seems that they are teaming up on a few points. Identity managment comes to mind. And DRM is next thing that Shwartz mentions today. And IP protection "bussines" was mentioned in every other sentence. It still rings in my ears that Ballmer said something in line of "we have two best platforms for development today, with all other guys nowhere in sight". Which is true, but I would very much like them to continue to compete.

Sun does have some work to do to reassure their friends who wanted to stay as far as they can from MS, that Sun and Java are stil a best choice. I'm happy to see that that kind of annoucements are all over the place today, but actually, only time will tell.

What is this? An April joke? 30% ? Unbelievable. :-(In case that should be true, which I don't hope, it would explain why SUN and MS are "friends"... because SUN had got very serious problems. Oh no... live sucks. :-(

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